Boycott against goods emanating from settlements shows where the rancid, global campaign against the Jewish state is heading.

The decision last week by the Methodist Church of Britain to launch a boycott
against goods emanating from settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem
will send a shiver down the spine of anyone with a feel for where the rancid,
global campaign against the Jewish state is currently heading.

The
boycott will involve transactions of the church itself, and extends to
encouraging all affiliated Methodists to follow suit. The Methodists boycott no
other country.

The fact that an institution professing allegiance to
values of love, truth and justice should have succumbed to an agenda of
hatred,
hypocrisy and barbarism is sadly emblematic of the degraded spirit of
our times,
and of the moral inversions which blow through them.

But who, these days,
can really be surprised about such happenings in modern Europe? It is
only the
banality, to appropriate Hannah Arendt, of this particular evil that
still has
the power to shock us. For, in watching the discussions at the Methodist
Conference which approved the boycott, there was little in the way of
the
visceral hatred of Israel which we have become so accustomed to seeing
in
academic settings or in the trade unions. Here was a group of almost
stereotypically ordinary, middle-class, English Christians calmly
reciting every
hackneyed anti-Israeli calumny in the book.

“What is happening in
Palestine today is what was happening in South Africa in the recent
past,” one
delegate said. Another spoke of the “66 percent of 9- to 12-month-old
babies
[that] are anemic in Gaza.”

Yet another described a picture, which she
held up in front of her, of a small boy “with large eyes” and “deep
pain” in
those eyes. “This little boy lives in Gaza,” she said ominously, adding
(without
irony) that the conference should “speak and act for those whose voices
are not
heard.”

Later, the point was repeated with one speaker lamenting the
position of the Palestinians who have “no one to tell of what they’re
going
through.”

There was a lecture on the Old Testament, the Jews as “the
chosen people,” the children of Abraham, and the revelations of Jesus:
“Jesus...
never speaks of the land or owning it; he speaks of the kingdom and
joining it,”
said the delegate joyfully. “...He teaches us God is not a racist God [her
emphasis] who has favorites. God loves all
his children [her emphasis] and
blesses them.”

A student of archeology from the University of Manchester
protested against accusations of one-sidedness in a report on the
conflict which
underpinned the boycott resolution: “No conflict is ever one-sided, “ he
said
before concluding, literally seconds later, that “perhaps it is not the
report
that is one-sided, but simply the conflict.”

IF TOTAL illogicality,
intimations about the dangers of Jews worshiping a racist God,
preposterous
assertions about the Palestinian cause not getting an airing in the
outside
world and depraved and asinine comparisons with apartheid South Africa
were the
stock in trade of the ordinary delegates, the church’s sophisticates
were not to
be outdone.

Here is the Rev. Graham Carter, the chairman of the working
group that produced the initial report. He is speaking at the end of the
first
debate, just after having made his (pro forma?) reference to upholding
the right
of Israel to exist: “We didn’t go through the list of criticizing other
governments, because there was no place to stop,” he said. “We could
have
criticized the United States for its past unquestioning support of the
government of Israel. We could have questioned our own government for
the
equivocality of its approach. Where would we stop? So we concentrated
simply on
the situation in Palestine itself.”

In referring to criticism of
governments around the world other than Israel, one might have expected
that
this was his cue to explain why Israel had been singled out. Not a bit
of it. It
never appeared to occur to him that the question of gross hypocrisy
might be an
issue. His only thoughts about other governments concerned the sense in
which
they might have been criticized for complicity in Israeli behavior! But
it is
when he comes to the question of anti- Semitism that he meets his
undoing. “I
want to state quite clearly and categorically that there is no hint of
anti-Semitism in what we have said or in what we intend,” he stated
boldly. “If
other people want to do things like that, that is their problem. It is
not our
problem as a Methodist church. We need to be honest about where stand
and what
we feel. And if we are concerned about anti-Semitism, why don’t we talk
about
the anti-Islam approach?” I leave it to others to judge whether there is
a “hint
of anti-Semitism” in what they have said or intended.

But, in so far as
his comments make any sense at all, one way of summarizing the rest
could be as
follows: “If this campaign against Israel results in more anti-Semitism,
we in
the Methodist Church wash our hands of it. We’ll act, and the Jews can
take the
consequences.

And what’s the big deal about anti-Semitism anyway? Can’t
we talk about Islamophobia.”

I DID not have the pleasure of talking to
the Rev.

Carter, who would certainly reject any suggestion of wrongdoing,
let alone that he had taken his church down the road to bigotry. But I
did speak
to the Methodist Church’s head of media relations, Anna Drew, whose well
prepared brief offered a lesson in where things have gone so badly
wrong.

“Do you have any boycotts of other countries in the world, Saudi
Arabia for example, where Christianity is banned?” I asked.

“Almost
certainly not,” she said.

“So why have you singled out the Jewish state?”
I asked.

“We have not singled out the Jewish state,” she replied, saying
that the boycott was not against Israel, merely against the occupied
territories.

And so the conversation went on, going round and round in
circles as Drew summoned up every ounce of conceivable pedantry to argue
that
singling out the policy of a particular country was substantially
different from
singling out the country itself, even though such a boycott applied to
no other
country or its policies.

“Don’t you realize that you’re joining a massive
global campaign against Israel?” I asked.

“There isn’t a campaign against
Israel,” she replied firmly. “It’s not as simple as that.”

“You don’t
accept that you’ve just jumped on a fashionable bandwagon?” I asked in
amazement.

“We are the first church... to do this... so we are not being
fashionable,” she replied.

At which point, what can you really say?
Overall, a church that behaves in the manner of the Methodists has
buried its
credibility under a gigantic dunghill of intransigence, pedantry, lies
and
distortions.

But let us not allow this matter to rest with a mere
recognition of whom and what they have chosen to become.

If the Methodist
Church is to launch a boycott of Israel, let Israel respond in kind: Ban
their
officials from entering; deport their missionaries; block their funds;
close
down their offices; and tax their churches.

If it’s war, it’s war. The
aggressor must pay a price.

The writer is director of
international
affairs at the Henry Jackson Society in London. He is the author of
A State
Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel